Although superior visual search skills have been repeatedly reported for individuals with autism spectrum disorder, the underlying mechanisms remain controversial. To specify the locus where individuals with autism spectrum disorder excel in visual search, we compared the performance of autism spectrum disorder adults and healthy controls in briefly presented search tasks, where the search display was replaced by a noise mask at a stimulus-mask asynchrony of 160 ms to interfere with a serial search process while bottom-up visual processing remains intact...

Successful interaction with the environment requires flexible updating of our beliefs about the world. By estimating the likelihood of future events, it is possible to prepare appropriate actions in advance and execute fast, accurate motor responses. According to theoretical proposals, agents track the variability arising from changing environments by computing various forms of uncertainty. Several neuromodulators have been linked to uncertainty signalling, but comprehensive empirical characterisation of their relative contributions to perceptual belief updating, and to the selection of motor responses, is lacking...

Chronic prenatal exposure to ethanol can lead to a spectrum of teratogenic outcomes that are classified in humans as fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD). One of the most prevalent and persistent neurocognitive components of FASD is attention deficits, and it is now thought that these attention deficits differ from traditional attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in their quality and response to medication. However, the neuronal mechanisms underlying attention deficits in FASD are not well understood...

In standard taxonomies, motor skills are typically treated as representative of implicit or procedural memory. We examined two emblematic tasks of implicit motor learning, sensorimotor adaptation and sequence learning, asking whether individual differences in learning are correlated between these tasks, as well as how individual differences within each task are related to different performance variables. As a prerequisite, it was essential to establish the reliability of learning measures for each task. Participants were tested twice on a visuomotor adaptation task and on one of two sequence learning tasks, the serial reaction time task or the alternating reaction time task...

In rodents, the five-choice serial reaction time task (5-CSRTT) has been established as a reliable measure of waiting impulsivity being defined as the ability to regulate a response in anticipation of reinforcement. Key brain structures are the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) and prefrontal regions (for example, pre- and infralimbic cortex), which are, together with other transmitters, modulated by serotonin. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging study, we examined 103 healthy males while performing the 5-CSRTT measuring brain activation in humans by means of a paradigm that has been widely applied in rodents...

BACKGROUND: Chronic abuse of heroin leads to long-lasting and complicated cognitive impairment. Dopamine receptors are critically involved in the impulsive drug-driven behaviour and the altered attention, processing speed and mental flexibility that are associated with higher relapse rates. However, the effects of the different dopamine receptors and their possible involvement in heroin-induced cognitive impairment remain unclear. METHODS: The 5-choice serial reaction time task (5-CSRTT) was used to investigate the profiles of heroin-induced cognitive impairment in mice...

Implicit sequence learning is ubiquitous in our daily life. However, it is unclear whether the initial acquisition of sequences results from learning to chunk items (i.e., chunk learning) or learning the underlying statistical regularities (i.e., statistical learning). By grouping responses with or without a distinct chunk or statistical structure into segments and comparing these responses, previous studies have demonstrated both chunk and statistical learning. However, few studies have considered the response sequence as a whole and examined the temporal dependency of the entire sequence, where the temporal dependencies could disclose the internal representations of chunk and statistical learning...

AIM: Distraction task (DT), which led to a modification of voluntary and involuntary reflex pelvic floor muscle (PFM) activation, might potentiate urinary incontinence, through an alteration of the temporal course between intra-abdominal pressure and PFM contraction. We evaluated whether cognitive rehabilitation (dual-task method) could prevent the effect of a mental distraction task on the reaction time of PFM contraction. METHODS: Thirty-nine healthy volunteers underwent two sessions of electromyographic (EMG) PFM recordings separated by a 2-week interval...

Reward and punishment motivate behavior, but it is unclear exactly how they impact skill performance and whether the effect varies across skills. The present study investigated the effect of reward and punishment in both a sequencing skill and a motor skill context. Participants trained on either a sequencing skill (serial reaction time task) or a motor skill (force-tracking task). Skill knowledge was tested immediately after training, and again 1 hour, 24-48 hours, and 30 days after training. We found a dissociation of the effects of reward and punishment on the tasks, primarily reflecting the impact of punishment...

RATIONALE: Members of the c-Jun N-terminal kinase (JNK) family of mitogen-activated protein (MAP) kinases, and the upstream kinase MKK7, have all been strongly linked with synaptic plasticity and with the development of the neocortex. However, the impact of disruption of this pathway on cognitive function is unclear. OBJECTIVE: In the current study, we test the hypothesis that reduced MKK7 expression is sufficient to cause cognitive impairment. METHODS: Attentional function in mice haploinsufficient for Map2k7 (Map2k7 (+/-) mice) was investigated using the five-choice serial reaction time task (5-CSRTT)...

A single bout of cardiovascular exercise performed immediately after practicing a motor task improves the long-term retention of the skill through an optimization of memory consolidation. However, the specific brain mechanisms underlying the effects of acute cardiovascular exercise on procedural memory are poorly understood. We sought to determine if a single bout of exercise modifies corticospinal excitability (CSE) during the early stages of memory consolidation. In addition, we investigated if changes in CSE are associated with exercise-induced off-line gains in procedural memory...

Attentional impairments and exaggerated impulsivity are key features of psychiatric disorders, such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, schizophrenia, and addiction. These deficits in attentional performance and impulsive behaviors have been associated with aberrant dopamine (DA) signaling, but it remains unknown whether these deficits result from enhanced DA neuronal activity in the midbrain. Here, we took a novel approach by testing the impact of chemogenetically activating DA neurons in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) or substantia nigra pars compacta (SNc) on attention and impulsivity in the five-choice serial reaction time task (5-CSRTT) in rats...

Effective learning results not only in improved performance on a practiced task, but also in the ability to transfer the acquired knowledge to novel, similar tasks. Using a modified serial reaction time (RT) task, the authors examined the ability to transfer to novel sequences after practicing sequences in a repetitive order versus a nonrepeating interleaved order. Interleaved practice resulted in better performance on new sequences than repetitive practice. In a second study, participants practiced interleaved sequences in a functional MRI (fMRI) scanner and received a transfer test of novel sequences...

Sleep is considered to support the formation of skill memory. In juvenile but not adult song birds learning a tutor's song, a stronger initial deterioration of song performance over night-sleep predicts better song performance in the long run. This and similar observations have stimulated the view of sleep supporting skill formation during development in an unsupervised off-line learning process that, in the absence of external feedback, can initially also enhance inaccuracies in skill performance. Here we explored whether in children learning a motor sequence task, as in song-learning juvenile birds, changes across sleep after initial practice predict performance levels achieved in the long run...

RATIONALE: Atomoxetine is a noradrenaline re-uptake inhibitor licensed for the treatment of adult and childhood attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Although atomoxetine has established efficacy, the mechanisms which mediate its effects are not well understood. OBJECTIVES: In this study, we investigated the role of cortical versus sub-cortical noradrenaline by using focal dopamine beta hydroxylase-saporin-induced lesions, to the prefrontal cortex (n = 16) or nucleus accumbens shell (n = 18)...

Both visual attention and response selection are limited in capacity. In the present study, we investigated whether visual attention requires the same bottleneck mechanism as response selection in a dual-task of the Psychological Refractory Period (PRP) paradigm. The dual-task consisted of an auditory two-choice discrimination Task 1 and a conjunction search Task 2, which were presented at variable temporal intervals (stimulus onset asynchrony, SOA). In the conjunction search task, visual attention is required to select the items and to bind the item features resulting in a serial search process...

A central issue in sequence learning is whether learning operates on stimulus independent abstract elements, or whether participants integrate surface features of ordered stimuli, resulting in stimulus dependent learning. Using the Serial Reaction-Time Task (SRT), the current study tests whether a previously presented sequence is transferrable from one source domain to another. Contrary to previous studies with Artificial Grammar Learning, there is a mapping between pre- and post-transfer stimuli, but contrary to previous studies using SRT the mapping is not obvious...

Huntington's disease (HD) is characterised by motor symptoms which are often preceded by cognitive and behavioural changes, that can significantly contribute to disease burden for people living with HD. Numerous knock-in mouse models of HD are currently available for scientific research. However, before their use, they must be behaviourally characterised to determine their suitability in recapitulating the symptoms of the human condition. Thus, we sought to longitudinally characterise the nature, severity and time course of cognitive and behavioural changes observed in HdhQ111 heterozygous knock-in mice...

BACKGROUND: Aerobic exercise training (AET) has been shown to provide general health benefits, and to improve motor behaviours in particular, in individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD). However, the influence of AET on their motor learning capacities, as well as the change in neural substrates mediating this effect remains to be explored. OBJECTIVE: In the current study, we employed functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to assess the effect of a 3-month AET program on the neural correlates of implicit motor sequence learning (MSL)...